Hosted communications providers provide hosted voice, messaging, and data services to customers. These services are often provided through a packet-switched network such as the Internet. The hosted phone services are often referred to as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services since the voice communications are delivered over the Internet instead of over circuit-switched networks such as the public-switched telephone network (PSTN). Some of the popular features offered by hosted communications providers include media processing capabilities such as call recording or playback. Call recording is needed, for example, when recording general conversation. “Playback” refers to the playing of audio during a call, such as for a voicemail greeting, or in an interactive voice response menu, or in an auto-attendant setting.
Typically, media processing tasks such as call recording or playback are handled by telephony servers that have specialized hardware media processors (e.g. VoIP chips and/or chip sets) installed to perform the signal processing required by such tasks. The specialized hardware can also perform other tasks such as converting from one codec to another (known as “transcoding”) when different codecs are used by communication devices in a particular call.
However, these specialized hardware resources can be expensive to purchase and maintain. Furthermore, the capacity of these specialized hardware resources to process calls can be a limiting factor in the call volume that can handled by a VoIP company.